The former MasterChef winner has crashes on two- and four-wheels.

Star and Car: Adam Liaw, celebrity chef

The former MasterChef winner has crashes on two- and four-wheels.

Star and Car: Adam Liaw, celebrity chef

31 Mar 2017Owen Thomson

The lowdown: the celebrated cook, writer and TV presenter endured the odd scrape and bingle during his early commuting career.

Career highlights: winning MasterChef Australia in 2010; authoring five cookbooks; presenting his hugely successful TV series Destination Flavour; being appointed an official Goodwill Ambassador of Japanese Cuisine by the Japanese government in 2016.

Current project: promoting his latest book, The Zen Kitchen.

What was your first car?

It was a second-hand Toyota Corolla hatchback, a good reliable car. It came to an untimely end when I rolled it over on a dirt road – at extremely low speed and not trying to do anything. I just slipped off the side of the road and hit a tree at the exact wrong time and it flipped over onto its roof. It wasn't particularly scary or particularly dangerous. It sounds worse than it was, but that was the end of that, really.

What do you remember about your early driving years?

I grew up in Adelaide and they don't have the draconian pink slips, so you can just have an absolute rust bucket on the streets forever in South Australia, which was great news when I was 16. For me it was quite a luxury to have a first car that was worth $3000 or whatever it was, because most of my mates bought their first cars for 300 or 500 bucks. We spent lots of weekends getting them kind of road worthy. We were still kids back then, and rather than playing mechanic we actually got to be a mechanic. But I also rode motorbikes for years before I got my first car.

Tell us about your two-wheeled career.

I got my first motorbike when I was seven or eight. I lived out of home since I was 14 so it was very important to get mobile. A motorbike meant I could get around by myself even when I was 16. I had a Kawasaki GPX 250. Then I had a ZZR, and put that around a telegraph pole. Again, just kind of slid off the road, again not particularly high speed or particularly dangerous, but yeah, had a couple of bike accidents when I was younger.

As a VW ambassador, what are you driving these days?

Mainly I'm in a Touareg Wolfsburg, which is a really nice car. It's a bit of a tank. I love it. You sit up nice and high. A couple of kids and a pram fit all very nicely in the back. It's a nice easy car to drive. I'm switching between that and the new Tiguan at the moment, which is also a lovely, lovely car.

What's your favourite drive?

We also have a Passat, and last year we drove from Sydney to Melbourne along the coast. It's a hugely underrated drive. Everyone talks about the Great Ocean Road, which is obviously stunning, but with this drive you can take a few days. And it's different every time because there are so many little towns you can stop at, spend half the day at a beach, get a motel. Then when you're in Melbourne and you want to come home, you can just zip up the Hume Highway. It's a great way of going on a driving holiday.